UX & UI designers: two roles, one product

What makes a user choose your site or app over a competitor's?

What's more annoying than not finding what you need on a website or app in less than 10 seconds? NOTHING.

In 2019, users are demanding and don't have time. They want immediate access to information and to be guided by optimized, attractive interfaces. That's where UX/UI designers come in. But who are they, and what do they really do?

Why does one product get more use than another? Why does a user prefer your site over your closest competitor's? You're going to need to bring in experts to face this fierce competition.

First, let's clearly define who is who and who does what.

#1 UI: User Interface

UI stands for "User Interface" — the user-facing interface. It's the design, the look of the site or app.

A UI designer's role is to make the product attractive and pleasing to the eye. They handle the design and creation of the user interface.

Their skills:

A UI designer needs several skills to create a website or an app that's pleasant to look at.

Creativity and innovation: the winning combo for great UI is a clear interface and a faithful expression of the brand image. Knowing the psychology of color and how to pair typefaces is very important to convey a brand's values and get the right message across. The UI designer mainly works on clarity of navigation, quality of content, and optimization of user paths.

A UI designer also needs technical skills in interface prototyping to make the Product Manager's project concrete, plus knowledge of wireframing (site structure) and web mockups.

It's often forgotten that the UI designer also works closely with front-end developers, who bring their recommendations to life. For that, the UI designer needs to know the devs' jargon (not always easy) to hold a conversation with them. The idea isn't to know how to code — that's not their job — but to know how it works and what's possible to build, so development can flow smoothly and effectively. UI designers tend to forget that without a developer, the fruit of their work can't go into production.

So it's beautiful, it's reassuring, you want to use it — yes, but is it practical?

UI is useless if your UX hasn't been thought through and isn't dialed in.

If you have a beautiful, flower-lined path in front of you, but you have to take a giant detour to reach your final destination, you'll cut across the field and walk on the grass.

It's the same for a website. If it's pretty and attractive but you have to click 15 buttons to find what you're looking for, you'll simply look elsewhere. That's where UX comes in.

#2 UX: User Experience

UX is the ergonomics of the website or app.

To create a great user experience, it's indispensable to take into account the expectations, but also the real needs of users.

The UX designer's role is to think through, reflect on, and design this product. They design the product experience from the user's perspective.

The word design in "UX designer" is closer to "design as conception" than "visual creation." As we said above, the visual side is more the UI designer's territory 😉

UX takes into account what a user's path will be on a website or mobile app.

The UX designer works in close collaboration with the Product Owner, who first identifies a problem prospects/users are having. The UX designer then enters a major research phase. When the product team doesn't have a PO, this initial task of identifying the problem falls to the UX designer.

There are many methods and steps a UX designer can use during the research phase. Not all of them are mandatory, and everyone has their own way of working.

A few examples:

— Create personas to give a personification to prospects and clearly identify needs

— Generate hypotheses about prospect/user behavior

— Conduct quantitative, qualitative, and scientific research on prospect psychology

— Use the Jobs-to-be-Done method, focused on customer needs defined through field research

— Evaluate UX with user observation through shadowing

— Create a User Journey for a global view of the user's interaction and their full experience with the product

— Analyze satisfaction surveys to assess user feedback

The UX designer's role is really to get to the heart of the problem by creating user scenarios with the help of this research phase.

The UX designer also works with back-end developers during the ideation and structuring (sketching) phase, creating wireframes focused mainly on the substance of the product rather than its form.

Then comes the review phase with the Product Owner, the developers, and the QA tester.

And what are all these steps and tools for? Working on the ergonomics of the site or app, and making its design coherent and its features intuitive — to guide the user along the path you want them to take.

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On the practical side, both profiles use design software. The ones most often required in job ads are: Figma, Sketch with its Zeplin extension, the Adobe suite, Invision Studio, Axure, Balsamic, and Framer.

#3 Teamwork

These two distinct roles collaborate closely on product design.

UI and UX designers have very different skills, but complementary ones for each other's success. Their common goal: a perfect product for happy users.